Before
★½
Apple TV+, episodes 1 and 2 available now, new episodes every Friday

Here’s an early warning sign about Before, Billy Crystal’s first proper TV turn since his breakout years on Soap in the late 1970s and early ’80s: the Apple TV+ series is a dark psychological thriller where Crystal plays a recently widowed child psychologist in the depths of interminable grief.

Hmm. So you’re telling me you’ve got one of the most beloved comedic stars in screen history, Harry Burns himself from When Harry Met Sally..., and you’re going to use him for misery porn? This show wants us to hate it before we even begin.

To be fair, at 76, Crystal has spent much of the past decade riffing on his comedic legend to mixed results – in 2015’s short-lived mockumentary The Comedians, where he tried to Larry David-ise his persona opposite Josh Gad; in 2019’s Standing Up, Falling Down, where he played an ageing comedian opposite Ben Schwartz; and in 2021’s Here Today, where he played an ageing screenwriter opposite Tiffany Haddish.

Crystal, who also serves as an executive producer on Before, clearly saw an opportunity to play against type in this series. Every comic legend deserves a chance to branch out, the same way Crystal’s buddy Robin Williams famously went dark, often. But Before is no One Hour Photo. It’s barely a blank Polaroid.

The series follows Eli (Crystal), who’s doing his best to ignore the grief caused by his wife Lynn’s (Judith Light) suicide – until a creepy blond kid arrives at his front door, his bloodied fingernails etching weird hieroglyphics into the wooden frame.

Rather than run or call for an exorcism, Eli – successful child psychologist that he is – takes on the creepy kid, Noah (Jacobi Jupe), as an assignment, quickly uncovering unexpected links between their respective traumas. The phrase “mass psychogenic illness” gets a lot of play, along with some esoteric nonsense about past lives, which you would’ve already gleaned from the show’s title because what else is the “before” going to stand for?

Before was created and largely written by Sarah Thorp, who wrote and produced the Omen sequel series Damien, which (perhaps tellingly) ran for one season before being axed. In Before, she leaves no horror cliche untouched. Noah sees monsters no one else can, he’ll suddenly speak in archaic tongues, he’s constantly scribbling visions from his nightmares, such as piles of human bones, in heavy black crayon (someone get him a full box of Crayola already!).